Telegram chat vanished on one end only. Can it be recovered?
September 27, 2022 12:04 PM Subscribe
My mother uses the Telegram app on her iPad. I'm using the Telegram app on an Android phone. In her app, the entire chat with me since we started chatting on telegram (several years) disappeared from one day to the next. It's just gone. On my phone, I still have all messages of the chat with her. She's desperate to recover it on her end (lots of photos I sent her while traveling). Is it possible to recover it? What else can be done?
We already tried turning it off and on again ie. uninstalling Telegram from the iPad and reinstalling it. No luck. Our chat is still gone on her end, and on her end only. She still has other chats with other people.
It's possible she clicked something and deleted it without realizing, I'm not sure how many steps and confirmation prompts that involves as I never tried deleting a chat myself. She really really feels awful about it as she used to browse back through the chat and look at photos and messages I'd sent her. She misses that a lot.
I messaged telegram support but it seems the support volunteers are not answering. I googled and came across questions on Reddit from people who had this happen to them but I don't see anyone who resolved the problem. I thought I'd try asking here first in case anyone has had this happen and found a fix, or in case anyone can come up with a workaround...
Could I possibly select all messages in my chat with her from my end and resend them to her? Would they be dated with the original date?
We already tried turning it off and on again ie. uninstalling Telegram from the iPad and reinstalling it. No luck. Our chat is still gone on her end, and on her end only. She still has other chats with other people.
It's possible she clicked something and deleted it without realizing, I'm not sure how many steps and confirmation prompts that involves as I never tried deleting a chat myself. She really really feels awful about it as she used to browse back through the chat and look at photos and messages I'd sent her. She misses that a lot.
I messaged telegram support but it seems the support volunteers are not answering. I googled and came across questions on Reddit from people who had this happen to them but I don't see anyone who resolved the problem. I thought I'd try asking here first in case anyone has had this happen and found a fix, or in case anyone can come up with a workaround...
Could I possibly select all messages in my chat with her from my end and resend them to her? Would they be dated with the original date?
Telegram allows deleting messages for you and not for the other participant, and that seems likely to be what has happened here. Few to no confirmation steps prevent doing that. I don't think that telegram provides an easy way to undo that. It would be possible to replay all the messages using the Telegram API, but not dated with the original date.
What you can do, since you still have the messages, is export the contents of the chat. This will produce a folder with html files that you can browse in any web browser, so you could give it to her and she could use it to browse the old messages.
I don't think the Android app has that feature, but the desktop app does. So you would need to install Telegram on a laptop. Then go to Settings -> Advanced -> Export Telegram Data.
Note: That does archive all your messages to everyone, so you would have to find a way to trim down the archive to only the messages in the chat with her, if you also use telegram with others.
posted by joeyh at 2:04 PM on September 27, 2022
What you can do, since you still have the messages, is export the contents of the chat. This will produce a folder with html files that you can browse in any web browser, so you could give it to her and she could use it to browse the old messages.
I don't think the Android app has that feature, but the desktop app does. So you would need to install Telegram on a laptop. Then go to Settings -> Advanced -> Export Telegram Data.
Note: That does archive all your messages to everyone, so you would have to find a way to trim down the archive to only the messages in the chat with her, if you also use telegram with others.
posted by joeyh at 2:04 PM on September 27, 2022
Response by poster: Thanks for the suggestions, unfortunately I can't seem to find a way to replicate the the possible solutions - the device my mom uses is not an iphone but an iPad so there's no images folder to recover images, and on my end I went to Telegram desktop but couldn't find any Advanced menu item under Settings to export the chat... I am using a Mac. Is the Advanced menu item only available on windows or Linux?
posted by bitteschoen at 11:09 AM on September 28, 2022
posted by bitteschoen at 11:09 AM on September 28, 2022
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posted by The Wrong Kind of Cheese at 12:29 PM on September 27, 2022